Sats boycott - live blog

Thousands of pupils at primary schools across England will get out of taking their Sats today as their headteachers stage a boycott of the national tests. But will the protest be as big as the unions have predicted? Tell us what's going on in your area as we follow the action live.

How many children have escaped Sats tests today? Photograph: Graham Turner

10.52am:The unions behind the protest - which is due to go on all week - have predicted that leaders at half the country's 17,000 primaries will lock up their test papers, although the reality behind that claim remains to be seen.

Heads say the pressure they put on pupils leaves not just them, but also teachers and parents, stressed and children missing out on valuable learning because of "teaching to the test", and argue that the league tables the results are used to compile demean children and their schools.

Those in favour of the tests, who include all the main political parties to some degree, say they're necessary to highlight pupils who are falling behind and let parents know how their children and school are doing.

But the very fact that headteachers - usually rather more closely associated with discipline and order - are happy to be cast as rebels shows how high feelings run about Sats. And the action they are now taking is no snap decision: the boycott has been threatened for at least a year.

11.28am:So what are the early predictions of how big a deal the boycott will be? Last week surveys by the Press Association and the Guardian found that across 37 local authorities, an estimated 1,010 schools were set to boycott the tests, while some others were still thinking about it.

But this morning the BBC suggested the unions may have been overoptimistic about the numbers of heads taking part. Across the 113 councils who responded to the corporation's enquiries just 15% of schools were definitely not doing the tests.

Some 45% had no plans to hold a boycott, and the councils - which cover 73% of England's primary schools - said they didn't know the situation in the remaining 40%.

11.54am: While some of the 10 and 11-year-olds whose heads have boycotted the tests are just doing normal lessons today, others are being treated to specially arranged alternative events.

At least 20 schools are expected to turn out for an "anti-Sats picnic" near the London Eye.

And at Lindale primary school in Cumbria, my colleague Jessica Shepherd has been told the classes are busy making things from pulleys and levers:

Eleanor, aged 10, is trying to make a car from card, wires and some pulleys. She tells me this is "much better" than sitting the reading test that her teachers have boycotted. "Sats make me feel pressurised. This is more fun and I am still learning," she says.

Angie Leonard, her headteacher, describes the atmosphere as "vibrant and more active than if the children were sitting tests". "People greatly under-estimate the pressure these tests put pupils under. There is a fantastic buzz of learning in school today."

12.28pm: The boycott had been billed as one of the first challenges facing the new government in what may turn out to be a summer of discontent. One suspects the parties may have other things on their minds today however. Still, what would they be saying if they had the time? Over to Jessica:

The Lib Dems and Tories don't exactly agree on Sats. The Tories want the tests to be reformed to be more rigorous, while the Lib Dems want them to be "slimmed down". The Labour government said they weren't "set in stone" and they would be happy to publish teachers' assessments of pupils at the same time as the Sats results, but had refused to scrap them. Only the Greens want them abolished.

Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The Department for Children, Schools and Families are not going to say anything about Sats today, a spokesman tells me. Last month Ed Balls, the schools secretary, said it was "extremely disappointing" that the teaching unions were boycotting the tests.

"It is not just that heads have a statutory duty to oversee the tests – they have a professional and moral duty to put the best interests of pupils and parents first," Balls said. "Pupils and teachers have been working hard all year and they should all be given the opportunity to demonstrate their achievements. It would be very unfair if some children were prevented from doing so at the last minute. We believe it is unacceptable to deny parents a full picture of the progress their child is making and information about what is going on inside their local schools."

There had also been talk of Balls consulting lawyers over a possible challenge to the boycott, which seems to have come to nothing.

12.49pm: There are suggestions on Twitter that some teachers may be getting their pupils to sit Sats, but giving them papers from previous years instead. Not that that plan seems to be going down particularly well... either do them, or don't, the critics reckon.

1.40pm:Interesting point from right2education in the comments below:

Are there any trends of league position v boycott from the survey?

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? In your experience, are schools taking part in the boycott more likely to be at the lower end of the league tables?

2.30pm: The last time teachers boycotted tests was in 1993, the NUT's head of education, John Bangs, tells me.

Members of NUT, NASUWT and AMMA - the previous incarnation of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers - overwhelmingly refused to administer key stage three tests in English, maths and science, with the NUT continuing the boycott in 1994.

They eventually got a promise from the then education secretary, Gillian Shepherd, that there would be a major review of the tests and no league tables produced for key stage 2 assessment, but the next year John Major introduced the tables anyway.

Yet teachers were successful in getting some of their concerns about workload addressed, with external marking being introduced. And Bangs reckons the fact such action had worked - to a certain extent - in the past made heads more likely to adopt a boycott this time round:

The most important thing was it left a folk memory that they could do it again if they weren't satisfied with the result.

Anyone - teachers or former pupils - got any memories of the 93/94 boycotts?

3.19pm:Jessica taking over now.

We are hearing that more schools are getting their pupils to sit past papers. This scuppers the league tables because schools won't send off the results to their local authorities, but it still ensures pupils are tested.

A school governor who doesn't want to be named has emailed us to say that he knows of many primaries in his area that are getting their pupils to sit 2008 Sats papers. They aren't sitting 2009 ones, he explains, because they have already done the questions for revisions.

Our school is doing the SATs "as normal" with papers from a previous year. From the children's point of view it should be "normal"

Photograph: Antonio Olmos

3.44pm: Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, says he has heard of a number of schools that are getting their children to sit Sats papers from previous years, instead of this year's tests.

We think Ofsted will think this is a perfectly valid thing to do and parents are likely to be quite happy with this.

Primary schools based in cities and towns are showing a "great appetite" for the boycott, he says, while those in rural schools are less likely to take part because their headteachers feel more isolated apparently.

And what about whether the boycott is going to lead to the tests being scrapped altogether?

We know we have a road to go down before they are abolished. We think there is an appetite for change though. We want to work with a new government to make sure we have an assessment system that doesn't control the curriculum. This boycott has demonstrated our determination to do this.